From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-05-06T02:53:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is PHP so popular?  What can we learn from the PHP camp?

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 12:42:04AM +0900, Lothar Scholz wrote:
> 5) Ruby don't have a good Web Tool. Amrita is okay, ERuby is okay, but
>    if you enter the professional level they fail. For example
>    streaming output into memory and postprocess the output in the same
>    script (for PHP users: obstack)

StringIO? A pair of threads? IO.popen('-')?

> 8) Everyone can learn PHP in a week, because it is much simpler
>    Even designer and low paid students, which is commercially
>    important.

Not sure I agree there. It may start simpler, but there are many "ifs"
and "buts" on the way. I started to read up on PHP when I thought it might
be a Perl-done-right, but it soon became clear that it had at least as many
faults as Perl, so I gave up.

I will agree on the flaws of much Ruby documentation though. In many cases
the documentation is just "list the classes and the methods" which makes it
extremely difficult to work out what they are intended to do, and how to
start using them. The 'csv' library in RAA is a particularly poor example:
http://rrr.jin.gr.jp/doc/csv/

but there are many others like it. In my case I read 'C', I read Ruby source
fairly well, and am not averse to a bit of trial-and-error with irb.

Regards,

Brian.